Siren: From a Song at Sea to the Wail in Your Street

The first sirens in literature are not sounds, not mermaids and not glamorous women. They are two voices on a meadow. In Book 12 of the Odyssey, the enchantress Circe warns Odysseus about them before he sails: whoever hears their song never goes home, and the grass around them is heaped with the bones of men who stopped to listen. Homer even uses the Greek dual — a grammatical form for exactly two — so his Sirens are a pair.

What do they sing? Not love songs. They promise knowledge. When Odysseus sails past, ears open but lashed to the mast while his crew row with beeswax in theirs, the Sirens offer to tell him everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens anywhere on earth. The most dangerous temptation in the poem is the promise to know it all. Odysseus begs to be untied; his men tie him tighter; the ship slips by.

A word nobody can explain

The Greek is seirēn, and nobody knows where it comes from. Ancient and modern scholars have floated guesses — one links it to seira, a cord or rope, as if the Sirens bound their listeners — but none has won general agreement. The word may not even be Greek in origin. That is a recurring theme in this book: the oldest myth-words are often the hardest to trace.

Homer never describes what the Sirens look like. Greek vase painters filled the gap with birds that have women’s heads, and the most famous example, a red-figure jar in the British Museum, shows them perched on the cliffs around Odysseus’s ship. For a thousand years, a siren had feathers.

Feathers to fins

Then, somewhere in the early Middle Ages, the siren went into the sea. Medieval bestiaries and sermons describe sirens as women above the waist and fish below — the creature English would call a mermaid. Some bestiaries hedge their bets and give her both wings and a tail. The fishy version won in the languages of southern and western Europe: Italian and Spanish sirena, Portuguese sereia and French sirène all mean “mermaid.” English, with its home-grown word for sea maidens, kept “siren” for the singer and the temptress, and used it more and more as a metaphor. A siren song or siren call is anything that lures you towards trouble.

The siren that sings underwater

The leap to the alarm came in 1819. The French engineer and physicist Charles Cagniard de la Tour built a device that made a tone by chopping a stream of air with a spinning, perforated disc; the faster the disc, the higher the pitch. It could also work with water, sounding while submerged — so he called it a sirène, a siren, after the singers of the sea. Physicists used it to measure pitch. Later engineers made it louder, and by the twentieth century sirens were warning ships, factories, cities and, eventually, everyone who has ever pulled over for an ambulance.

So the sound in your street is named after a voice that drew sailors towards rocks. The modern siren does the opposite: it tells you to get out of the way.

Manatees and mermaids

Biologists borrowed the word too. The order Sirenia holds the manatees and dugongs, slow plant-eating mammals of warm coastal waters, along with the giant Steller’s sea cow of the North Pacific, hunted to extinction in the eighteenth century. The name nods to a long tradition of sailors reporting “mermaids” that, in hindsight, may well have been sea cows surfacing to breathe. It is not the most flattering comparison for either party.

The Canadian echo

Here is where the word gets interesting for readers in Canada. In Canadian French, as in the French of France, sirène keeps all its lives at once. A children’s book in a Montreal library can be about a sirène with a shimmering tail, while the fire truck outside sounds its sirène on the way down the street. English split the word’s meanings between “mermaid,” “siren” and “temptress”; French kept them in a single drawer. Bilingual readers live with both systems, and every time a siren wails past, the old singer is in the sound.

Not bad for two voices on a meadow. The Sirens offered Odysseus knowledge of everything; what they actually got was a place in every language that sailed past them.

Notes and sources

1. Homer, Odyssey 12.37–54 and 12.165–200, in the public-domain translations of Samuel Butler (1900) and A. T. Murray (1919), via Perseus.
2. The “Siren Vase,” Athenian red-figure stamnos, early fifth century BCE, British Museum.
3. Cagniard de la Tour’s siren (1819) is described in standard histories of acoustics; the origin of Greek seirēn remains disputed.